Work for Pie closes a $300,000 round to reinvent open-source dev recruiting

Every so often I get the chance to meet people who I think can really change things. When I met Cliff McKinney and Brad Montgomery of Work for Pie, it was definitely one of those moments. You can read my review of the site here, but the Cliff’s Notes version is that these two guys are aiming to change the way that open-source developers showcase their work while finding new projects. Today the team is announcing that they have closed a $300,000 seed round, saying that it’s “large enough for a small team”.

You see, McKinney and Montgomery are open-source developers themselves. They know what the community is like and they understand its needs. Work for Pie is a bit like a Klout scoring system, but with actual transparent metrics. It’s also a bit like a new-aged resumé, though McKinney tells me that they’re not content to stop there.

“We have been hard at work on changing the way companies recruit. We want to put cold-calling scorched earth recruiters out of a job, and we want to make the endless job description paragraphs on “Your job site here”.com a thing of the past.”

The WfP guys see the site as something far more than just a tool for getting a job. In fact, they’re focused on the idea that Work for Pie fits into the rapidly-evolving educational space, because of how open-source developers get jobs.

“Right now, there’s no real way to take what you’ve learned via Codecademy or Udacity and translate that into a traditional resume. But, take what you’ve learned, use it to hack on a few open source projects, and improve your Work for Pie score in the process, and perhaps that’s enough.”

Thus far the team has built a site that boasts thousands of users, actively building out their portfolios. By giving them a score that’s based on their meaningful participation on sites like Github, Bitbucket and Stack Overflow, WfP is helping them to showcase their abilities in a manner that actually helps get them more work.

McKinney tells me that the team has bigger plans, and you can rest assured that we’ll be staying in touch with them to find out what they are as they’re released. But for now, with a round closed via am>ventures and Solidus, this Memphis-based graduate of the Seed Hatchery accelerator is on the track for big things.